President Donald Trump and his team have moved quickly to reorganize government staffing, including removing or sidelining some workers, and have proposed expanding his authority to dismiss additional federal employees.
The Republican president has been in office for less than a week, but his early actions to reshape parts of the U.S. government have drawn significant attention within the federal bureaucracy.
At the National Security Council 160 staffers have been sent home. About 20 senior career attorneys at the Justice Department were reassigned. The heads of the U.S. Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration were let go along with other officials.
Government offices focused on workforce diversity are being closed, with staff placed on leave, while a series of executive orders reversing Biden administration policies have created uncertainty among officials about their roles and responsibilities.
Trump said on Tuesday he also plans to dismiss more than 1,000 officials appointed by his Democrat predecessor Joe Biden.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about government worker concerns.
During his campaign, Trump pledged to reduce the size of government and reform the bureaucracy.
The pace of his actions targeting positions across various government agencies has surprised federal employees in Washington and public sector unions, despite their anticipation of changes under his administration.
"A lot of people did not expect him to act with such a broad stroke," said Don Quinn, an employment lawyer who represents federal employees. "And so there's definitely a sense of disbelief. There's fear - people are concerned about their livelihood, people are concerned about their families."
Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, faced a similar reaction when he addressed a group of 30 federal employees in a class he was teaching Thursday. "It was just stunned silence," said Lenkart, whose union represents 110,000 workers. "Everyone is on pins and needles."
Lenkart pointed to lesser-known agencies, like the TSA, where it usually takes months before a new administration gets around to replacing the leadership, that were targeted on Trump's first full day in office on Tuesday.
Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, the first female uniformed leader of an armed forces branch, was removed in part for what a Department of Homeland Security official said was her excessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
In a memo released Tuesday the Trump administration said that all federal DEI office staff would be placed on paid leave by 5 p.m. Wednesday, because their offices were to close.
Federal agency heads have been asked to identify by Friday employees on probationary periods, or who have served less than two years. Such employees are easier to dismiss. Trump also issued a freeze on federal hiring, except for military, immigration enforcement, national security, and public safety jobs.
The 160 staff members at the National Security Council were told during a brief call on Wednesday to turn in their devices and badges and head home, a former NSC official said. They were people seconded to the agency from the State Department, the Pentagon, and other parts of the government.
"It came as a surprise and a shock to people," said another ex-official who spoke to former colleagues who were on the call.
Trump signed an executive order this week aimed at making it easier to dismiss federal workers by reclassifying their job status, a move that has raised concerns among these employees.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 employees in 37 federal agencies and departments, sued Trump and other administration officials on Monday in federal district court for the District of Columbia, seeking to block the order.
The union argues in the lawsuit that the order wrongly applies employment rules for political appointees to career staff.
The vast majority of the more than 2.2 million employees of the federal government are career civil servants who are hired on merit and serve the government as a whole. Civil service positions do not terminate at the end of an administration and civil servants can only be fired for cause.
Trump's order establishes a new category of federal employees, "Schedule Policy/Career," who would not have the usual civil service protections and could be dismissed more easily.
By deeming anyone involved in "policy" as part of this new category, the pool of people that could potentially be dismissed expands enormously, because nearly everyone in government touches policy in one way or another, said Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
Trump ordered the reclassification of many government workers at the end of his first term, known as Schedule F, which Biden rescinded on his first day in office in 2021. Estimates then were that Schedule F could make at least 50,000 federal workers vulnerable to being dismissed.
The new order is broad enough that hundreds of thousands of people could be reclassified, Moynihan said, before firings begin.
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees - the largest federal employee union representing 800,000 federal and D.C. government workers - said members are worried.
"The members I've heard from are anxious and uncertain about what the future holds for their employment and for their families," Kelley said.
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